


Tomorrow to Calais

by Allegro



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Horror, Multi, Work In Progress, a bit more then strange, cosette dislikes the candlesticks, dark fairytale au, dark interpretations of characters, surreality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-18 04:39:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allegro/pseuds/Allegro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We must get away from shadows<br/>They will never let us be<br/>Tomorrow to Calais..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the white house

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing. Non profit fun only. Rating is subject to change.

They live in a new town, a new country, in a pretty white house with a wide and pretty garden and little Cosette is pretty and dark and sweet, lips like forget me nots, pearls in her mouth and sunshine in her eyes.

Papa is a sad Papa, even as he combs his fingers through her hair and dresses her in frilled petticoats and crowds her arms with beautiful, dull eyed dolls.  The house is big, and white, and indeed very pretty, but on the inside it is made of dusty shadows and drawn curtains, and Papa prays in front of the mantel each morning and night, where there sits two candlesticks, regal and heavy in moonlight silver. Cosette doesn’t care for the candlesticks, but when Papa beholds them, his face is soft and weak and strange, and she doesn’t want to upset Papa, so instead she goes and plays in the sun that melts in buttery shades against her skin.

At the back of the garden, there is an assortment of ancient weeping willows, crouched over like a line of old washer women, dragging their branches like gnarled hands along in the water. For indeed there is water there, in the form a green pond, and she’s leant over it enough times to try to peer into it, but it’s dense and deep and she can never see the bottom. Scum collects in crusty bubbles that ripple and cling to its surface, and to her it smells odd, like a mix of tobacco and boot polish.  

Sitting at the end of it is always a man. She thinks he looks younger then Papa, but she can’t be sure, for Papa is fair and good and handsome, even with the burgeoning of his wrinkles, but this man’s features are lugubrious and pallid, the bulge of his eyes shining and wild like a feral cats, his nose long and broad, his mouth spread out into a tortured line. She has never seen him smile, but she theorizes that his teeth would be white and sharp, like a tiger’s. His greying hair is a soggy slap around his thin face, his officer’s coat (she knows it’s an officer’s coat, and is quite proud of that fact; she found an image of the very same garment in her costume book, but when Papa saw it he started to shake and shake and shake and nothing she could do would stop him shuddering) is a monstrously soaking weight around his body.  His flesh is a dead grey, and he smells like something rotting, but that could just be the damp in the trees.

She has never played near him, never shown him her dolls or dresses, never touched the mangled black of his coat (she doesn’t know why she thinks this, but she has always imagined it to be slimy and cool, like the scales of fish.) For a part, she had thought him a lifelike statue, much in the same vein as the bare marble women she had seen in history books, sculpted hair rippling down to cover the swell of their breasts. But he mutters to himself, words a garbled rush of nonsense, his jaw grinding with each wrestle of tongue and teeth.

She is afraid of him, afraid of his wet, warped little corner of her lovely garden. She leaves him alone, and sometimes, when she plays near the gates, his head is turned up and his eyes are on her. If she draws close, his attentions fix onto some unseeable distance. She never tells Papa of the man, and she doesn’t know why.

Sometimes she picks up her skirts and hikes around the trees to the front of the house. Around this idyllic home of fancies is an impregnable forest, thick and green and swollen with moisture, and the stink of earth makes her dizzy.

There is only one path that leads off from the tall, spiked gates of the great white house. It’s a thin pathway, graveled and uneven; rarely used, except for the lady.

Cosette calls her “The Lady” for she has little other name for the woman who wanders through the trees. A somewhat pathetic creature, wrapped in dirty linen and barefoot, ash blonde hair cut close to her head in matted clumps. Her skin is hued with a tint of wretched blue, her hands bony and her nails curved and sharp as incisors. Her eyes are round and staring, stamped with a savage hunger, and upon her lips she wears a crooked and humorless smile.

As she walks, her body undulates in uneasy sways, as if she is a clockwork doll that has been wound up too tight. Cosette can hardly stand the inspector, but the woman she can’t abate. She steals away into the house, lest the creature reach through the bars and claims her.

Inside the house she finds her Papa, warm and strong with arms like pillars, and beneath the flicker and spit of the candlestick’s shadow, his embrace is engulfing and far too close, and beneath the bend of his mighty back and the hot clasp of his hands and the odd brightness of his eyes, Cosette feels very small.  


	2. the lady beyond the gate

The night is bitter. A dank, lingering cold; the worst kind of cold. And yet Cosette is warmer, warmer then she’s ever been. Sweat bristles on her skin until the sheets are tousled with damp and she beats them away with her ankles; not daring to draw attention, not daring to rouse Papa (who sleeps so lightly) and to hear the tread of his heavy feet in the length of corridor that separates their rooms.

She is hot, hot, hot. And then there is more heat, trickling between her legs, and the sheets are spoiled.  Cosette throws back the covers and in the moonlight, her eyes draw down to see a slimy line of bobbled red black staining the inside of her thigh and dribbling down to the jut of her knee.

She has to move now, to create noises and rustlings, all the while struggling to not lift Papa from his slumber. In the dark, the endless lines of her dolls observe mutely, each face pale and shining and perfect, shadow falling across their features in differing curves and dips until they seem to resemble a lunar chart. Crescent, half, gibbous, full. The moon that shines tonight is a distended orb in the sky, bloated and full and filling out the inky murk of the night like a swelling on dusky skin.

The press of the floorboards shoots ice up her leg. They don’t have carpet. She knows they can afford it, even with the onset of this horrible winter, but somehow she imagines Papa fears any potential cushioning of her footsteps, but there is no reason for her to think that (or to feel a coil of white hot frustration join the unholy jabs in her lower abdomen.)

Cossette picks up the blankets and sheets in her arms, and thinks of the washroom with its lead lined bath, and then of the proximity of the tiny room near to Papa’s quiet and desolate quarters and how the pipes rattle and groan in the walls.

She pads out onto the landing, past the bathroom and waddles down the stairs, her blankets gathered in her arms.

Just out the backdoor, near the empty stables, is an ill-used pump. The premature winter has chewed up the last fruits of summer and rotted autumn right through. The garden is no longer voluptuous and thriving, but withered with frost, and beneath the overlay of night, has become misshapen and strange.

 Cosette drapes Papa’s cape over her shoulders. It drags on the ground as she stumbles through the back door, the frigid bite of the air stealing beneath her nightgown and striking her stiff. The willow trees rustle and quiver in the distance, and through the tangle of frozen leaf she can just about see the glimmer of ice on the pond.

She grips the pump handle, allowing spores of rust to settle in half melted snow and with a few gasping tries, water splutters through frozen pipes and empties into a waiting bucket. There, Cosette dunks in her shamed sheets. Ah! The water is stark in chill; it splashes over the sides and soaks her right through.

She cries out despite herself; it is a miserable sound.

A moan whistles along the breeze.  

She stills. Her fingers, lain in the water, pale with the chill of it. The reflection ripples and distorts and she can see just about see the bare impression of her face, ashen and wild eyed and clammy.

Another long, ponderous sound, almost sweet, except it strains and cracks as it nears its end. At first, it seemed to be a long way from the gates, buried within the leaves and trees and the bird song she never hears. It distracts her for a moment. Cosette pulls the dry end of the soaking blanket and drapes it round her shoulders.

A sharp pain sets her stomach into a vice. It forces Cosette over, bent double, and at that, a banshee howl punctures the air, loud and lugubrious and truly dismal to the ear.

Cosette staggers, looking to limp back to the house. Her muscles clench and release; a fresh spill of blood imprints another sodden, browning patch on her nightdress.

And then, down the trodden path, past the gate and just barely visible in the shade of the trees, she sees it.

Upstairs in her childhood bedroom, Cosette possesses a wind up tin soldier. He’s old and dense with rust and she likes to believe that he belonged to Papa in his youth. But on the rare occasion she winds him up, he doesn’t move with the liquid ease of her other toys. Instead he jerks, twitches, wooden feet set at an odd angle and his arms shifting back and forth in clicks of ancient clockwork. It agitates some unspoken corner of her brain and she has taken to hiding it in the back reaches of her closet.

The creature, clearing ground fast, carries itself with that same behaviour of ticks and shudders, only imbued with a frightfully forced levity that brings to Cosette’s mind the notion of deathly reanimation.

Beneath the moon, the lady’s skin is the colour of dusty lead, her tattered smock (now grey, with flecks of black blood spotted on the collar and bosom) running in rags around her starved ankles. Her head lolls from side to side, her eyes rolling deliriously in her head, her white hair growing out into ruined curls that bob by her pointed chin.

Her mouth is torn open in a wide, rictus grin, missing teeth and black gum and a red tongue probing uselessly at the air.

Cosette is frozen. The white house looms behind her, a beckoning sanctuary, and she is suddenly conscious of another figure, dark and ridden with shadow, seeming to rise and break through the dark waters of the duck pond.

Maybe tonight is a dream and she will wake tomorrow without blood or bloodied blanket. But her senses are too alight, the cold too cruel a nip on her bare shoulders, for her sheets slip from her skin and drag into the mud on the ground.

As Cosette puts her attention to the great lock strung across the house gates (set there by Papa himself, with his huge hands and strong back and cotton shirts as white as heaven) she sees that the bolts, by no admission other than their own will, are sliding across, the massive locks cracking open, the chains unfurling to the ground like rattling snakes.

And the Lady, with her eyes bleary and unfocused, suddenly snaps her dead gaze onto the girl, and Cosette notices that there are tears lining the woman’s gaunt cheeks, and from the creature’s throat there issues a series of high, desperate yips, resembling the whining echo of a wounded dog.

One skeletal finger presses upon the gate.

It creaks inward.

Cosette screams.

It pierces the silence, the gloom, the dark, the bare moonlight. There is an inaudible _splash_ from behind the leafy blanketing of the weeping willows.

Cosette flees to the door; there, hands outstretched and blocking the back entrance, is a full and fearsome shape.

Cosette kicks at this blockade, battering it with her small fists, until two gentle hands reach and close around her wrists, and there are lips placed sweet against her brow, and she dissolves into sobs on the hard and humungous chest of her Papa.

The wind is a tempering breeze that fusses her hair. A curl flys up and tickles her ear. The hinges of the gate groan as they sway forward and back. The pathway leading to the forest is barren of life.

She is trembling violently and the white hot stickiness of her thighs makes her retch. Papa ushers past her, ambling out to peer fiercely at the gate. The locks lay in metal tangles on the floor. As he kneels to inspect them, Cosette feels another trickle of warm moisture slither down her leg and clot between her toes.

She glances at Papa, and then at the spoilt sheets lying rumpled and ruined near the pump, and she can’t move fast enough to retrieve them for Papa it seems is there already, turning them over in his hands (she will never get used to their size) and with each new appraisal of the strange, stinking stains, his face blanches with alarm.

“Cosette…” He holds them out to her, and with a lurch in her stomach, she sees his face of devoid of understanding. “Cosette, my child, my child, are you hurt?”

“No Papa,” Her fingers bunch into her nightgown. The seams tug and complain, stitching fraying with her feeble force. “I-I’m fine Papa.” She thinks quickly. “It’s…”

From over Papa’s shoulders, the Lady watches blankly through the bars. One finger, the same finger that had inched the gate open bit by bit, is lifted and held over her thin, frowning lips.

“I’m sick, Papa,” She murmurs. Her father, still gripping the sheets, follows her gaze and sees nothing but the leaves in the trees and the mist settling on the ground. “I think I’m sick.”

 


End file.
